Avital Ronell

There was this toss-off story the other day on the front page of The New York Times -- "What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?" by Zoe Greenberg -- which happened to be the most read story on Tuesday. It tells the tale of academic superstar Avital Ronell sexually exploiting one of her NYU grad students. A choice passage reads:

The problems began, according to Mr. Reitman, in the spring of 2012, before he officially started school. Professor Ronell invited him to stay with her in Paris for a few days. The day he arrived, she asked him to read poetry to her in her bedroom while she took an afternoon nap, he said. 

“That was already a red flag to me,” said Mr. Reitman. “But I also thought, O.K., you’re here. Better not make a scene.” 

Then, he said, she pulled him into her bed. 

“She put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself — her buttocks — onto my crotch,” he said. “She was kissing me, kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” That evening, a similar scene played out again, he said.

I was at Berkeley in the 1980s the same time Ronell was teaching in the university's Comp Lit Department and making her rocket-like ascent.

Some thoughts about this time are contained in a review I wrote of David Mikics' Who Was Jacques Derrida? (2010) for my public library's website:

This is a solid, readable intro to Jacques Derrida, the French post-structuralist powerhouse. I studied Derrida at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s and read most of his major works, books like, OF GRAMMATOLOGY, SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, DISSEMINATION, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE, but once I left school and entered the rat race I failed to keep up with his new output. Mikics does a fine job establishing the continuity of Derrida's thought, from an Algerian Jewish childhood to international celebrity. But this is not an adulatory book. Mikics is critical about what he sees as the underlying skepticism of Deconstruction and dismissive of its Leftist political tilt. But then again, he's a Comp Lit guy. When I was in school Derrideans were divided into two camps: literati, who wore studded wristbands and black leather and studied in the Comparative Literature Department [Avital Ronell], for whom the philosophical tradition was not the main concern; and students like me for whom the history of philosophy was the whole point. Derrida's writings make sense, truly, as part of the Western philosophical canon, which is the chronicle, going back to the Presocratics, of man's attempt "to sing a song that says it all at once." So read this book and enjoy it as I did but use it as a springboard to read Derrida himself.